Category Archives: Quotes

Quite apart from my believing the Bible to be the inspired and authoritative word of God, on scientific grounds alone I have never been able to accept the theory of evolution. The difficulties I am left with, if I accept the theory of evolution, are altogether greater than the few residual difficulties I am left with when I accept the biblical record.

…we may read the order of events as literal in Genesis 2 but not in Genesis 1, or (much, much more unlikely) we may read them as literal in Genesis 1 but not in Genesis 2. But in any case, you can’t read them both as straightforward accounts of historical events. Indeed, if they are both to be read literalistically, why would the author have combined the accounts, since they are (on that reading) incompatible? The best answer is that we are not supposed to understand them that way.

Some have put forward the theory that Genesis does not claim to be a scientific treatise, but is just allegory or poetry, that the Bible does not pretend to be scientfically accurate but is a typical, poetical, allegorical way of describing creation. To this the answer is, of course, that there is not a trace of poetry in these early chapters of Genesis. The form is not poetical at all. It claims to be history. It claims to be giving facts, and the history that follows immediately and directly out of it is certainly true history and not allegory.

I think it is quite without scriptural warrant to say that all these gifts ended with the apostles or the apostolic era. I believe there have been undoubted miracles since then. At the same time most of the claimed miracles by the Pentecostalists and others certainly do not belong to that category and can be explained psychologically or in other ways. I am also of the opinion that most, if not all, of the people claiming to speak in tongues at the present time are certainly under a psychological rather than a spiritual influence. But again I would not dare to say that ‘tongues’ are impossible at the present time.

Another doctrine which is most important when cultic matters are evaluated is the biblical doctrine of sin. The absence of a belief in sin is the hall-mark of the cults. That is what I meant earlier when I said cults are often preached from so-called Christian pulpits. Certain men have become very popular through preaching that there is no such thing as sin, that it is very wrong to talk about sin, and that the Church, by preaching a doctrine of sin, has kept the people from truth. Instead of a belief in sin, they say, you must believe in yourself. ‘Positive thinking’, as it is termed, is very popular in America today, and it is being preached in this country also. It sounds so marvelous – ‘There is no such thing as sin; you must not speak against yourself, you must not look down on yourself. Believe in yourself; you are wonderful if you only realized it! What the Bible calls sin is an insult to mankind; we now understand all these things psychologically.’

None of the cults like the doctrine of sin; and, of course, for the very good reason that you are never going to be popular if you preach the biblical doctrine of sin. But the cults must be popular, otherwise they cannot succeed. God is not in them, so something has to keep them going. The men and women who keep going do so by pandering to people, pleasing them and praising them.

It is exactly the same with regard to the doctrine of salvation. Obviously if the cults do not believe in sin you would not expect them to be right about salvation. They do not believe that the Son of God came from heaven to earth in order to take sin upon Himself and bear the punishment… They do not believe in substitutionary atonement.

.. I have come to the conclusion during this last year (1968), during my convalescence, and while sitting at the back of many congregations, that a number of people seem to go to a place of worship and to a service in order to go home! Their main idea seems to be to get out and to get home. Why do they go at all? That is the question, I think, that needs to be asked. Why this great anxiety for the service, and especially the sermon, to finish? There is only one conclusion to be drawn; these people need to be humbled. These people are lacking in spirituality, in a spiritual mind and outlook, and in spiritual understanding.

I contend that we can lay it down as a fairly general rule that the greater the amount of attention that has been paid to this aspect of worship – namely the type of building, and the ceremonial, and the singing, and the music – the greater emphasis on that, the less spirituality you are likely to have; and a lower spiritual temperature and spiritual understanding and desire can be expected.

In a discussion about the reasons why Dr. Lloyd-Jones discontinued the candidates class at his church, Iain Murray makes reference to the first book review Dr. Lloyd-Jones ever wrote. The book reviewed was A. T. Schofield’s Christian Sanity, which had much that was agreeable to Dr. Lloyd-Jones. But, Dr. Lloyd-Jones took issue with the author’s statement that “nearly 75 per cent out of 1,000 Christians questioned were converted before the age of 20.”

Here are Dr. Lloyd-Jones’s comments:

From this, Schofield tends, as many others definitely do, to conclude that conversion is somehow related to puberty and its concomitant changes. One wonders whether there is not a grave danger here of confusing ‘confirmation or acceptance into full membership’ with ‘conversion’. To me, there is nothing which is quite so pernicious and detrimental to the true interests of Christianity as this association of ‘conversion’ with a certain age period. There is no question but that this teaching is responsible for all the concentration upon ‘the young people’ which characterises our church work in these days, and makes many a minister and deacon say woefully: ‘The young people and children are our only hope – we must concentrate upon them.’ Such statements and such a belief show a lack of faith and set a limit upon the power of God. The Gospel recognises no such limit – there is hope to the end, to the eleventh hour. There is as much hope today for the middle-aged and the aged as there is for the young people. It may be more difficult to teach morality and ethics to the older people or to teach one’s own special fads and fancies with respect to the Christian life, but to ‘The Help of the helpless’ and ‘Hope of the hopeless’ there are no such distinctions. Yea, indeed, the besetting sin of most who are concerned in Christian work is to concentrate on one particular age or one particular truth instead of delivering ‘the whole counsel of God’ to all and sundry whoever or whatever they may be. Concentration upon the young is a large part of the genius and success of Roman Catholicism, but surely it is the very antithesis of the genius of Protestantism. It is one thing to produce a religious man – men can do that – but it takes the power of God in Jesus Christ to produce a Christian man, and there is no limit to that power.

We have been watching the latest campaign of a large “church” in southern California with some mild interest. It seems that the church no longer exists to preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified (if it ever did), but is now a one-stop shop for living your best life now. You can visit the web site and look long and hard without finding any reference to the saving work of Jesus Christ, but you can find much about living healthier.

As I’ve watched this play out, I’m reminded of a quote from Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Dr. Lloyd-Jones was a medical doctor who left the medical profession to become the pastor of a mission church in Port Talbot, Wales. Here is what he said about the experience of leaving the medical profession.

It is not often that I make any kind of personal reference from this pulpit but I feel this morning that I must speak of an experience which bears on this very subject. When I came here, people said to me: ‘Why give up good work – a good profession – after all, the medical profession, why give that up? If you had been a bookie, for instance, and wanted to give that up to preach the gospel, we should understand and agree with you and say that you were doing a grand thing. But medicine – a good profession, healing the sick and relieving pain!’ One man even said this, ‘If you were a solicitor [lawyer] and gave it up, I’d give you a pat on the back, but to give up medicine!’

‘Ah well!’ I felt like saying to them, ‘if you knew more about the work of a doctor, you would understand. We but spend most of our time rendering people fit to go back to their sin!’ I saw men on their sick beds, I spoke to them of their immortal souls, they promised grand things. Then they got better and back they went to their old sin! I saw I was helping these men to sin and I decided that I would do no more of it. I want to heal souls. If a man has a diseased body and his soul is all right, he is all right to the end; but a man with a healthy body and a diseased soul is all right for sixty years or so and then he has to face an eternity of hell. Ah, yes! we have sometimes to give up those which are good for that which is the best of all – the joy of salvation and newness of life.